Chương 28: Who Wants Steak

"Why exactly do I have to tag along." Raven, watching the whole situation settle, had been trying to slip quietly back into the dark when Kaelvorn dropped down out of the sky and caught her shoulder.

"How long's it been since you had an actual full meal? This is a rare shot at eating someone else's food for free." Kaelvorn murmured it at a visibly uncomfortable Rachel.

"Let go! Bad things happen to people who stick too close to me!" She struggled a little, even tried to blink out with magic, but Kaelvorn casually swatted the resulting wisps of magical smoke apart with a couple of light taps, the kind of contact that should have been physically impossible against something that intangible.

"So your plan is what, staying isolated, alone... didn't you originally come to Earth looking for warriors who could actually fight your father alongside you?" Kaelvorn kept his voice down, glancing at the three walking ahead of them. Green Lantern had already dimmed his glow. A ball of green light strolling down a Gotham street at night would've drawn a little too much attention otherwise.

Batman was in the middle of asking Nightwing something, apparently digging into some detail from the three days he'd spent shadowing Kaelvorn. Rachel shut her eyes hard, pulled her magic back in, and bit out a stubborn answer anyway.

"After actually scouting this place for a while, I'm pretty convinced there's nobody on Earth who could stand against Him." No use fighting it. Every flavor of magic, witchcraft, or mystic-side energy that touched Kaelvorn's body just got reduced to a purely physical effect. And Kaelvorn happened to have a body considerably tougher than anyone had a right to expect.

"Then why are you still out here on the streets? All you're doing is making yourself miserable without getting any closer to what you actually want." With experience that outran his physical age by a mile, and having touched a piece of Rachel's soul and memory firsthand, Kaelvorn cut straight through whatever pride the girl was holding onto. Rachel didn't say anything else. Whether from anger or genuinely running out of comebacks, she just glared, dead-eyed, letting Kaelvorn half-drag her along.

Batman still hadn't brought Kaelvorn to the actual Batcave hidden under Wayne Manor. Instead, one of several backup dens. This one tucked into a sewer entrance along a cliffside. Denied his shot at visiting the real comic-book landmark, Kaelvorn let out a quiet sigh, released his grip on Raven's arm, and walked openly into the dim main chamber, standing at the center of the room like he was about to face some kind of tribunal. Batman, having already secured the yellow ring properly, watched him.

Nightwing announced he'd go find some food and vanished down a side tunnel. Only Green Lantern lingered in an unwatched corner, quietly running his ring over every inch of the cave, hunting for some other special material he had absolutely no clue existed. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Something changed in your body." Batman said it low. It came out phrased like a question, but carried the weight of something he'd already confirmed. Kaelvorn nodded openly, glancing over at Green Lantern with real interest. Hal, catching the look, straightened up fast and started whistling, doing his best impression of someone who hadn't been doing anything at all.

"That tingling sensation is still there, even now. And I'm pretty sure the source is coming off Green Lantern here." A few more sets of eyes locked onto Hal Jordan. Hal's hand shot to cover the ring on reflex, tucking it behind his back, like that alone could suppress whatever emotional-spectrum energy was leaking out.

"Why's everyone looking at me? There's nothing in Oa's records about the emotional spectrum directly catalyzing a species' physical evolution." Having said his piece, Hal seemed to fully convince himself on the spot, straightening back up with his usual confidence.

"Kid, you're actually from that whatever-strum planet? Or did you fall in from some other universe entirely?"

"Viltrum." Kaelvorn corrected him without much fuss, nodded, and let something faintly troubled cross his face.

"As for whether I might be from another universe, that's actually what I assumed at first too." Kaelvorn gestured toward Raven, still keeping to a dark corner of her own.

"I grew up on Viltrum. Our civilization conquered several hundred living planets in our stretch of the galaxy. And in all that time, I never once ran into an actual magic user."

"But since landing on Earth, this place is absolutely crawling with them. That doesn't line up with Wobagant's Law. Scale the density of Earth's magic users out across the whole galaxy, and with as many civilizations as Viltrum's conquered, we should've run into at least a few by now." Wobagant's Law was something Kaelvorn had made up on the spot, but he figured Batman's supposedly encyclopedic knowledge probably covered some equivalent Earth term for the same idea. Sure enough, Batman bought it.

"Earth has something similar. The Drake equation. It gets applied to probability models for how often a civilization produces metahumans or magic users too."

"Right. So after running into that many magic users, I actually started thinking, for a while, that maybe I'd landed in a completely different universe." A shadow crossed Kaelvorn's face.

"But that yellow ring called me Zente Thragg, of the Virgo Supercluster."

"If this were actually a different universe, how would it know exactly where I'm from, and my real name?" Every eye in the room swung back to Hal Jordan. He was the only Lantern Corps member present, and nobody here understood ring-selection mechanics better than he did. Hal didn't hold back either, cleared his throat with a closed fist, and strode out of the shadows with his usual bravado fully restored.

"No mystery on the name front. Any name you've ever used on Earth, any Lantern Corps clear across the galaxy can pull that up. It's, uh, it's based on some kind of universal underlying logic thing. I forget the exact mechanism." Batman watched Hal squirm through his own vague understanding of his own Corps' basic operations with total calm, then pressed forward.

"And the Virgo Supercluster?" That finally got Hal's attitude to snap back into something serious. This did, after all, involve a genuinely terrifying warrior civilization, one whose members could apparently evolve off the emotional spectrum directly, and one specimen of that exact species was standing right in front of him.

"That's sixty million light-years out. Outside my jurisdiction. I've already filed a request with the Corps member who covers that sector, but a full scan of an entire supercluster takes serious time and resources. Could run years." Hal tapped his own ring once.

"What I can tell you right now is that, at least according to Oa's database, there's no planet called Viltrum anywhere in the Virgo Supercluster." Batman's attention came back to Kaelvorn.

"We'll keep watching Viltrum as an open threat for now. Right now we need to work through something else." Kaelvorn nodded, following the logic easily.

"I know. Testing my body's new structure after the change, right? You already pulled all my data from Mr. Wayne?" Green Lantern shot Batman a quiet look. Batman's expression stayed completely flat as he confirmed it outright.

"That's right. Bruce probably already told you he has some working arrangement with the League. Getting your data from him wasn't difficult." Hal tipped his head back, looked up at the cave's distant ceiling, and gave a small, uncomfortable shudder. Kaelvorn glanced at him.

"Does Green Lantern here need to use the bathroom?" Batman pointed Hal toward a direction that apparently led to one, and Hal, thanking him with real gravity in his voice, wandered off slowly. Kaelvorn followed Batman off in the opposite direction. Nightwing came back into the main chamber carrying a plate of something visibly steaming hot, looked around, saw no one but a silent Raven standing in the shadows, and held the plate up.

"Uh, I've got some fresh steak here if anyone's up for it?"